Topic Archives: Videos

Gordon Bell has been involved with self-tracking for over a decade. From his ground-breakign MyLifeBits project to his popular book on the possibilities of a fully digital life he is constantly thinking about new ways we can understand ourselves through the data we collect. We are always excited to see him at our QS events and were especially happy to have him reach out to us about presenting at our last Bay Area QS meetup.

Gordon Bell’s HR data from a day he visited with his lawyers. Note the spike during the meeting in the morning.

Gordon has experienced two heart attacks, one in 1983 and another in 1996, two double bypasses, and currently is living with his third pacemaker. It probably isn’t surprising given his medical history that he has a keen interest in understanding his heart. In this talk Gordon describes what he’s been learning from the data collected from his pacemaker and the 320 days of heart rate and activity data he has collected with his Basis watch.

We’re also excited to have Gordon joining us at our upcoming QS15 Conference & Activate Expo. We’ve made some early bird tickets available for readers of the Quantified Self blog (for a limited time): Register here!

Greg Kroleski has been tracking his time for the past six years, starting when he was 20-years old. Using a spreadsheet he designed himself he collects how much time he spends in eight different categories: Survival, Labor, Social, Spiritual, Mind, Expression, Body, and Distraction. In this talk, presented at the San Francisco QS meetup group, Greg describes the data he’s collected and what he’s learned about where his time goes. If you’re interested in applying his tracking methodology he’s graciously put his spreadsheet template online here.

Richard Sprague is interested in understanding peak performance. Over the last few years he’s been tracking various aspects of this life to try and understand what helps and what hinders. Inspired by our friend and renowned self-experimenter, Seth Roberts, Richard decided to test if consuming fish oil affected his response time. Using a simple reaction time test developed by Seth to test if butter made him smarter, Richard tested himself when he was and was not taking fish oil pills. In this talk, Richard explores his data and discusses what he found out when he ran his analysis.

In 2013 Beth Martin was dealing with a failing startup, starting a new venture and working so much she moved her office into her bedroom to limit the time between waking and starting work. After a series of additional changes led her to near breakdown she decided to take six months off to rewrite her life. In this talk, presented at the Berlin QS meetup group, Beth describes the series of self-imposed challenges she created for herself and what she learned while tracking them and their impact on her life.

Paul LaFontaine is on an incredible journey to understand himself, his stress, and how he works through consistent examination of his heart rate variability (HRV). We’ve featured a few of his talks here on the Quantified Self website, and we were happy to have him present at a Bay Area QS meetup this past December. In this talk, Paul describes how he experimented with cognitive testing and recording his HRV to better understand if he was in a Flow state, and how to attain that balance between challenge and skill. Some very interesting personal conclusions about the role of belief in one’s own abilities versus actual skills.

“Science is really about repeatability, about process, about discipline, about characterization, about controlling noise, and there are lot of different mechanisms that we can pull together to tell a story or inform a decision.”- Ian Eslick

This past April we were lucky to host a meeting of researchers, toolmakers, science funders, and government representatives for our first Quantified Self Public Health Symposium. This one-day meeting, and the work leading up to it, helped to shape our thoughts and ideas around what data access means and how it can be used to shape personal and public health. Access can take on a variety of different meanings from being able to obtain a copy of your data, to being able to contribute to and use public data sets. But access doesn’t always have to deal with the transfer of bytes of information. What about access to process, people, and ideas?

At that 2014 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium we were happy to have Ian Eslick join us and give a short talk about personal data and the scientific process. Access to the methods of science and the scientific process is an important piece of the puzzle, especially as personal data become easily captured and more readily understood. Too often, the world of science and research is help up on a pedestal, out of reach for individuals struggling to understand themselves. In this talk, Ian touches on his personal journey of self-experimentation and how access to the “tools of science” can be highly impactful, especially for those battling chronic conditions.

I’m fascinated by self-tracking projects that focus on things that are hard to quantify.

Such is the case here. Fabio Ricardo dos Santos is gregarious and likes to be around people. A lot of people. But he had a nagging sense that something was out of balance.

To better understand why, he began to track his relationships and interactions. He soon found that out of the people that he knows, only about 14% are what he considered to be important relationships and that they made up 34% of his interactions. He felt that this number was too low and it spurred him to spend more time with that important 14%.

But he didn’t just track his time with people and the number of interactions. He expanded his system to include the quality of his relationships and interactions. He found that this made him focus on face-to-face interactions and video chats over emails and texts.

The other side of this, though, is that when you have a system where you rate and rank your relationships, how does it not seem like you are rating people? What are the implications of doing so?

Sebastien Le Tuan was chronically late. Only after a candid conversation with his father did he realize what affect this might have on his personal and professional life. In this talk, presented at the Bay Area QS Meetup, Sebastien describes how he started tracking his punctuality and what he learned from the process.

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We’ve featured Bill Schuller here on the Quantifief Self website before. He’s given some great talks about tracking with his children. However, Bill hasn’t been satisfied with these or his other previous public speaking efforts. So like any good self-tracker he set out to see what he could learn from tracking and measuring his public speaking. In this meta-talk, presented at the Bay Area QS meetup group, Bill presents some of the tools he was using in real-time to measure himself and the audience. Once your done viewing this talk make sure to send Bill feedback by filling out his short survey here.

Julie Price has been tracking her weight consistently for the last four years. Like many of us, she found that her weight goes up and down depending on various life events. In this talk, presented at the Bay Area QS meetup group, Julie discussed what she’s learned about her weight and what correlates with weight gain and weight loss. Specifically, she focuses on the role of family gatherings, exercise and running races, and how different food and dieting methods either helped of hindered her progress.

We’re excited to have Julie joining us at our 2015 QS Global Conference and Exposition on June 18-20th. Early bird tickets are now available, and we hope you can join us for a great three days of learning, sharing, and experiencing the latest in QS techniques and tools. Register now.

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